SXSW 2021 online edition — Day #1
Five Nuruners from the Montreal and Toronto offices are participating in the 2021 online edition of SXSW this week. Like every year, conferences and hot topics are not lacking! On the agenda: relational design, the influence of AI on design, responsible innovation, digital humanism, etc. Follow us daily on our social platform to find out what’s being said, who’s saying it, and what our experts think about it!
For this first day, Kat Savin, Experience Designer, Laura Li, Experience Designer, David Bélanger, Director — Strategic Planning and Business Design, David Han, Director — Experience Design and Anthony Habib, Director — Client partner, share what they got out of it.
Their first impression can be summarized as follows: “Conference is good so far. Great execution by SXSW for the online user experience. Great user flow to help manage this large amount of information, from session discovery to sign up and consumption.” Let’s hope this feeling lasts until the end of the week!
Focus on four conferences: Relation Design, Creative Machines: AI & The Future of Design and Media, Responsible Innovation: Move Fast and Fix Things and A New Digital Humanism: Art + Tech + Policy
David Bélanger, Director of Strategic Planning and Business Design, participated in this morning’s SXSW conference on relational design. Here’s what he got out of it: There’s a growing consensus on the limitations of human-centered design, notably its narrow focus on the product and not the system(s) impacted by the product. This session focused on how to complement the desirability, viability, and feasibility model with different sets of assumptions to open up our minds: addressing systems not things, using lateral rather than linear thinking, and looking at facts and fictions ‒ through speculative design ‒ to challenge our decisions, broaden our perspective, and foresee pitfalls.
Conference: Relational Design
David Han, Director of Experience Design, talks metaverse, the new virtual world. Synthetic Media encompasses any assets that have been wholly generated through or manipulated by an algorithm. This class of content and the experience built around them is the future of Design and Media — we call this new-world the open #metaverse. #AI #machinevision #computationaldesign #interoperable #blockchain #NFTs
Conference: Creative Machines: AI & The Future of Design and Media
Anthony Habib, Director — Client Partner, attended the Responsible Innovation: Move Fast and Fix Things conference. Here’s how he summarized the speakers’ points of view. “Value often means growth and monetary value, but there’s a shift happening. The definition of value is changing. The way that we think about product design is going to have to change accordingly. We are no longer gathering requirements… people are defining the systems that they need with the way that they’re living. Responsible innovation will always drive more value. Because it’s part of people’s lives and it’s more durable.” -Ed Doran (Senior Director / Microsoft), -Wally Brill (Head of Conversation Design / Google) — Karin Giefer (Design Leader / Amazon).
Anthony’s takeaway: “A lot of the discussion around responsible innovation revolves around this idea that the most impactful innovation, is the kind that can transform communities and improve people’s lives. In a world of connected solutions and platforms, we should be able to move fast enough to do that. The problem is that our constructs (political, economic, social, etc.) are just not designed to work together. If we could develop solutions to bridge those gaps… sky’s the limit.”
Conference: Responsible Innovation: Move Fast and Fix Things
The conference title that Laura Li, Experience Designer, attended calls out: A New Digital Humanism: Art + Tech + Policy. It’s clear that the need for digital humanism, bringing human and citizens to the centre of technology and policy, is calling. For anhour, the discussion focused on how art can be the soft power of diplomacy and connect people from different cultures, technology can also achieve so. To do so, inter-disciplinary specialists should collaborate with openness and respect. It will also require the willingness to experiment, to take risks, to embrace uncertainty, and to open to criticism.
Conference: A New Digital Humanism: Art + Tech + Policy
If you’re interested in a subject, please let us know. We’ll be happy to explore it further.
